ed, of
laws that are invariable. The alchemists introduced no poetical fiction
when they spoke of the microcosm, asserting that the system of man is
emblematical of the system of the world. The intercalation of a new
organic molecule in a living being answers to the introduction of a new
form in the universal organic series. It requires as much power to call
into existence a living molecule as to produce a living being. Both are
accomplished upon the same principle, and that principle is not an
incessant intervention of a supernatural kind, but the operation of
unvarying law. Physical agents, working through physical laws, remove in
organisms such molecules as have accomplished their work and create new
ones, and physical agents, working through physical laws, control the
extinctions and creations of forms in the universe of life. The
difference is only in the time. What is accomplished in the one case in
the twinkling of an eye, in the other may demand the lapse of a thousand
centuries.

[Sidenote: Defence of the process of all things by law.] The variation
of organic forms, under the force of external circumstances, is thus
necessary to be understood in connexion with that countless succession
of living beings demonstrated by geology. It carries us, in common with
so much other evidence, to the lapse of a long time. Nor are such views
as those to which we are thus constrained inconsistent with the
admission of a Providential guidance of the world. Man, however learned
and pious he may be, is not always a trustworthy interpreter of the ways
of God. In deciding whether any philosophical doctrine is consistent or
inconsistent with the Divine attributes, we are too prone to judge of
those attributes by our own finite and imperfect standard, forgetting
that the only test to which we ought to resort is the ascertainment if
the doctrine be true. If it be true, it is in unison with God. Perhaps
some who have rejected the conception of the variation of organic forms,
with its postulate--limitless duration, may have failed to remember the
grandeur of the universe and its relations to space and to time; perhaps
they do not recall the system on which it is administered. Like the
anthropomorphite monks of the Nile, they conceive of God as if he were
only a very large man; else how could it for a moment have been doubted
that it is far more--I use the expression reverently--in the style of
the great Constructor to carry out his int